Did early NASA photographs reveal
evidence of ancient alien
artifacts on the lunar surface?

I listen quite often to late night AM radio -- Coast to Coast AM usually -- and every now and then a guest shows up who really seems to make sense. It's amazing how sensible people can sound when in reality they probably don't even remember to wear pants. When Richard C. Hoagland talks about the ruins of Cydonia on Mars, for example, you can almost see the old skyline of crumbling pyramids as you walk down the dusty rubble-strewn reddish boulevard towards The Face.

Then later you go look at the photos and with a little imagination you can see what people were excited about, but it's just not convincing. Maybe it's the key to hyperdimensional physics, written in the dust of Mars for future Earth-bound descendants to decipher, or maybe it's just terrain. It's hard to tell from grainy photos.

Another interesting topic, one in which I have a personal interest, is the possibility of ancient artifacts on the Moon. I remember quite a few of those pictures making the rounds of science fiction magazines and checkout-counter newspapers in the early 70's.

Some were said to show the skeletons of old skyscrapers on the distant horizon of the lunarscape, and computer enhancements even pulled out details such as broken windows. Not that this made any sense on the Moon, where window panes might be a terrible architectural concept -- it was just interesting, and like the Face on Mars story, people were tempted to take it seriously. One photo which did strike me as very unusual showed a perfectly symmetrical white pyramid in the center of a lunar crater. The photo had been taken from orbit by one of the mapping missions which preceded Apollo.

Follow up:

Most of the photographic evidence being floated about today regarding lunar artifacts is rather poor in contrast to the old photos published in Analog in the 70's. I'm disappointed that I've not been able to find them again, but probably they'd not be impressive any longer. Over time, if mundane solutions are the right ones, we generally do figure them out. The Face on Mars for example, turned out to be a quirk of lighting and low resolution photography. A later mission much less famous took high resolution photos of the same area and shows the Face in detail. There's no Face. It's what we'd call a hill, back here on Earth.

Did ancient alien astronauts
arrange my underwear to resemble
alien artifacts on the moon?

But as a believer in legends, I do wish more of the false ones could be sorted out and set aside. So many of the new legends turn out to be nothing more than photos with faults misinterpreted by people who know very little about photography. They sound like alien robot heads on the radio, but when you get a look at the evidence, they're just rocks.

Kind of like the photo I posted at the beginning of this article, which looks like the remains of a lunar sculpture portraying an alien warrior in battle gear. Someday this photo may be popular evidence of ancient lunar civilization. Actually, it's just yesterday's underwear in the laundry basket.